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Studies at the University of Padova in Italy and by France's research agency INSERM show higher risks of dementia from retiring early. The INSERM study shows that for every additional year worked we reduce the risk of dementia by 3.2 percent. Retiring at age 50 is considered very, very poor decision, and before 60 very poor decision, as cognitive development, mood, and active engagement with work offering complexity, all relate to good mental health. Countries like U.S. and Denmark where people tend to work for longer than in France and Austria are shown to be doing significantly better in cognitive performance in a 2010 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The Italian study shows the longer you spend in retirement the higher the risks of cognitive decline.

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The situation in Guangdong province in 2012, with older factories unable to compete with the rising wages, stricter environmental enforcement, and lower export demand. Many Taiwanese manufacturers are closing factories. The growth in Dongguan, a manufacturing hub in Guangdong, is estimated at 3.5% for the first three quarters of 2012, half the overall rate for Guangdong province. A researcher in a Chinese think tank says China's manufacturers are in a kind of "sandwich trap" with competition from Vietnam and India in lower wage production and competition from Germany and the U.S. in higher wage technology intensive products. This is especially true in 2012-2013, now that U.S. and German manufacturers have reduced costs and increased competitiveness.

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Ford is looking at all options open to it as alarm spreads over the sudden and deep falloff in sales of trucks and SUV's.

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About 15% of black men of working age in the population, and 21% of black women, were employed in the U.S. public sector, according to the population survey. The Labor Department reports 500,000 jobs in the public sector were lost since 2007. This reverses an historical trend of resilience in jobs for the public sector during economic downturns. If population increase since 2007 is figured in there are even fewer jobs considering more jobs might have been added, with estimates as high as 1.8 million. This is bad for black people in the U.S. because many work in public sector jobs driving school buses, in the post office, in the police and in other public services, with black people being 30% more likely than whites to hold a public sector job, and twice that of Hispanics. Thic comes at a time when the black community has seen a devastating impact from the foreclosures and other economic damage that followed the 2008 financial crisis. The result is shown in a study of foreclosures for 2005-2009 at Cornell University showing mostly black and Latino neighborhoods were affected by foreclosures at three times the rates for white neighborhoods. According to Pew Research Center the median white family had net assets of $142,000 compared to $11,000 for the median black family. With median black household income at 60% of that of white households the gap keeps increasing especially with high unemployment in black neighborhoods....

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A report published by Capital Economics of Toronto, based on Labor Department data, shows the U.S. is not adding the kinds of jobs with the pay, benefits and hours of the 8.75 million jobs that disappeared during the recession. Labor Department data support this analysis. The number of food preparation and serving workers are expected to grow by 394,000 by 2018, but the pay is only $16,430 for these jobs. The good well paying jobs are continuing to be lost. Large employers such as Lowe's home improvement chain is eliminating 1700 managers, and adding 10,000 weekend sales positions and new assistant store manager positions. This use of parttime workers also reduces income levels of workers. The impact of this is to limit the consumer spending. As local government is shrinking from budget cuts, better paying jobs are being lost in state and local government, and workers are earning less in the new jobs that do similiar work.

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The CDU convention in Leipzig, Germany passed a compromise resolution that lays the ground for a EU country to voluntarily leave the euro zone and still maintain membership in the European Union. The resolution called for changes to the Lisbon Treaty to allow a euro zone member that is "unable or unwilling to permanently obey the rules connected to the common currency... to voluntarily... leave the euro zone without leaving the European Union." Merkel told delegates that Europe must change the EU treaty to allow for strong automatic sanctions for violations of the monetary union treaty. "We need to send a clear signal. We don't whine; we don't complain. We know instead that we have a job to do." On the issue of voluntary withdrawal from the eurozone, the earlier decision by Merkel and President Sarkozy of France- when prime minister Papandreou of Greece decided to put the issue of membership to a referendum- was to tell Greece that leaving the eurozone would mean leaving the European Union. This CDU resolution provides a basis for Greece to resolve its debt problems outside the euro currency, as experts suggest....

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Toyota is reducing senior management positions to 60 from 77. The board of directors will also be smaller, with 11 members instead of the current 27 members. It was felt that the large board did not enable discussion of important issues and slowed down decisionmaking. This is part of the new Business Plan and the new global vision for Toyota. The thrust is on sales in emerging markets which Toyota will target for increasing sales to 50% of the total sales by 2015, up from 40% currently. Sales in developed markets are set to decline to 50% of the total sales by 2015, down from 60% currently. The other push is in the hybrid sales area. Toyota will roll out 10 more hybrid vehicles by 2015, in addition to all electric cars, plug-in hybrids. Toyota will continue to have an all-Japanese board, and will use a committee of outside advisors to stay abreast of opinion in other countries. Akio Toyoda announced these plans recently and did this by himself, as he puts his own ideas to work for setting Toyota's direction....

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Italy's major problem is lack of growth, with growth averaging 0.3% in 2001-2010 compared to 1.1% for the eurozone area. In the 1st quarter of 2011 growth was only 0.1%. Italian bonds yield two percentage points above the yield on German bunds. With growth at the present level, Italy's would see an increase in debt to GDP ratios, according to Barclays Capital. Debt to GDP is currently at 119%.

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John Taylor on the dual mandate for inflation and unemployment and discretionary policies by the U.S. Federal Reserve that ended up creating booms and busts in the U.S. economy. He advocates replacing the dual mandate of "maximum employment" and "stable prices," which was inserted into the Federal Reserve Act in the 1970's, with a single mandate for "long-run price stability." Taylor points out that this will still give the Fed flexibility, as it is focussed on long run price stability. The Fed does not have to overreact to short run increases in inflation. And he points out that this actually will work well for unemployment as the booms caused by an overextended period of low interest rates such as that in 2003-2005, have led to booms followed by busts with high unemployment.

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Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, gives his ideas on Articles 2 of the 1971 Constitution (which established Islam as the religion of the state), and Article 7 of the interim Constitution (which guarantees equal citizenship before the law, regardless of religion). As head of Egypt's agency of Islamic jurisprudence, he gives his assurance to the West and to Egyptians, that the religious establishment of Egypt and he personally, is committed to tolerance and popular sovereignty that respects the rights of all citizens. He points to Egypt's tradition of a moderate and tolerant view of Islam. He says that Egypt threw out the heavy hand of authoritarian rule after many years and is not about to replace this with another type of authoritarian rule based on Islam. Islam's place in Egypt he argues, will be similiar to state churches in Denmark, and England, and similiar to Islam as the national religion in secular states like Tunisia and Jordan. The kind of Islam he sees for Egypt, in his words, is that of freedom and tolerance....

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Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, that he wanted to see more power reside in the European Parliament, that democracy was consistent with integration. German chancellor Merkel says the European Commission should "act more like a government with all the powers," and the European Parliament should become more important than national parliaments. This is the vision of Europe that leaders are supporting in 2012. Monti gave as one major reason for a European governing entity- national governments with their own local interests had created the economic trouble Europe faces today, with Greece being a textbook example of how everything can go wrong. Germany and France, he says relaxed the fiscal discipline rules of the Stability and Growth Pact, and this could happen again.

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The unemployment rate in the U.S. state of Ohio drops to 7.2% in June 2012 from 10.6% in the second half of 2009. But polls show two thirds of the respondents see the economy as being worse or the same as in 2011. Because of lower wages in some industries such as auto manufacturing which are reviving there appears to be a lowering of incomes and expectations.

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Scott Anderson of the NYT provides an indepth look at the Arab World and its fragmentation through the eyes of five people from each part of the Arab world- Egyptian, Kurd, Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian. He says the countries that fell apart are precisely the ones that were formed by the British and the French, and Italy, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire  using divide and rule policies- Britain in Iraq, France in Syria, and Italy in Libya- without much thought given to setting up viable nation states. This is why Iraq has a Sunni-Shia divide, Syria has similar divisions, and Libya with a largely tribal based structure, never really held together after the colonial powers left, and were held together only by strong dictators. Today's problems trace back to these historical events. This is complicated by the largely young demographic and restlessness of the people for change coupled with problems of underdevelopment in education, tribal loyalties, religious loyalties, and lack of political and social structures that could keep the countries together as change and transition to democratic processes took place. The role of the military further complicated matters in Egypt. Even Iran experienced these divisions because of the intervention of the great powers including Russia in Iran since 1900, leading to swings between liberal governments, foreign power supported governments, and a swing back to religious leadership as at present. This is one view of the region, others are presented by Ramadan (Oxford),  Bernard Lewis (Princeton), and leaders in Qatar and Emirates, other experts, some of whom point to the failure in leadership and the elites to find solutions to the problems of underdevelopment, in education, health, infrastructure, and aspirations for a voice in their governance. As the same divisions left by colonial powers affected Asia- in India, China, and Korea, but a larger vision of progress prevailed through crises and difficulties.        ...

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Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah sign a powersharing agreement brokered by the U.S Secretary of State Kerry and president Karzai after Afghanistan elections in 2014. The question is whether the two can set aside their differences and make it work, and can they negotiate some form of peace agreement with the Taliban to give Afghanistan and the region years of peace after so much conflict. Pakistan and India's elites and military need to step up to the plate to set aside differences by looking to the long term future of the region and the aspirations of the people for better infrastructure, services, education and healthcare, so long denied to the region. The Kashmir floods, and the floods in Pakistan before that, recent elections in India and Pakistan showing the clear aspirations for development of the people, are a reminder of so much that remains to be done and so much that was never done.

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Islamist parties are having difficulty integrating into political life and bridging the differences with secularist or liberal political parties in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Pakistan and Turkey following the democratic transition in 2011-2013 in the Muslim world. Some progress has been made, but lack of experience, lack of respect for the opposition and other opinion, overreaching, personal styles of individual leaders such as Erdogan and Morsi, and poor economic conditions after decades of neglect under military rulers in Egypt and other countries, is creating problems for Islamist parties in government.

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The serious problem of the large number of long term unemployed in the U.S. in 2012, strikingly different from any previous recession the U.S. has experienced. This means that if the problem is not addressed or solved these unemployed people will simply fall by the wayside, say experts. U.S. Federal chairman Bernanke, says this is a priority to be taken into account in setting interest rate policy. His fears are that this will be a permanent loss to the productive capacity of the U.S. Evidence of the extent of this problem is that the share of the population that is working has barely budged since late 2009 when the global financial crisis hit. It dropped from above 62% to about 58% in late 2009. It was 58.6% in ealry 2012, based on Labor Department data, even though the unemployment rate edged down to 8.3% by Feb. 2012.

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The wounds left behind in S. Korea from the 1997 Asian financial crisis when the IMF imposed conditions for $21 billion in loans as part of a $60 billion loan package to prevent a sovereign debt default. The conditionality imposed for loans led to layoffs and economic hardship for the working class. S. Koreans remember the crisis as the "IMF crisis." It also has a particular stigma in S. Korea which the IMF is now trying hard to erase. One laid off employee from an automobile plant describes the period as a hard hitting IMF typhoon. So struck are S. Koreans with the term that it has become synonymous with financial hardship. In the 12 years since the crisis the IMF itself has changed. It is now trying to provide help to countries on better terms and is conscious of the problems of austerity policies. During the 2008 financial crisis Seoul stayed away from the IMF. Seoul is host to the G-20 in 2010 and now has a participatory role in international meetings. The IMF has created a emergency loan facility that could be useful for Asian countries and wants to change the perception of the IMF in Asia....

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Helene Cooper and Worth point to the vacillating response to the Arab Spring and movement for democracy and freedom in the Middle East of the Obama administration and President Obama. The dangerous overtones of this lack of U.S. leadership in the region as the U.S. completes a withdrawal from Iraq without an agreement for a residual presence, sees diplomacy reaching an impasse with Iran's development of nuclear weapons, and the Syrian civil war drawing in Turkey with its long border with Syria, and drawing in Saudi Arabia as a defendor of Sunnis in Syria. The stakes for Russia in Syria were minimal compared to that of people in the Middle East and the U.S., yet it had an outsized influence with its early military assistance to the Assad regime and the lack of U.S. leadership to resolve the situation in Syria in favor of the democracy movement.

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Changes to China's five year plan to include critical social goals, reduce income inequality, and provide a social safety net. The influence of local governments in distorting central government policy.